MSF reported that its doctors treated 34 people wounded in the airstrike at its hospital in the nearby town Haradh. The group also reported that women and children were among 29 people dead on arrival at the facility.

The camp, which currently houses approximately 5,000 people in crude tent shelters, was established in 2001 to house people displaced by fighting between the Yemeni government and Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi militia in the northern provinces. “People in Al Mazraq camp have been living in very harsh conditions since 2009, and now they have suffered the consequences of an airstrike on the camp,” Pablo Marco, MSF operational manager for Yemen, said in a statement released on Monday.

The MSF also reported that it has treated more than 500 patients at its emergency surgical unit in the southern port city of Aden …

Saudi-led airstrikes over the weekend destroyed power plants in Houthi stronghold Saada, knocking out power to most of the province. Jet fighters also hit targets throughout the capital of Sanaa for a fifth straight day Monday. Bombs rained down on the presidential palace as well as air defense systems, missile launch pads and jet fighters. Sanaa has been under the control of the Houthis since last September.

In less than a week, the Saudi-led campaign of unrelenting airstrikes has reportedly destroyed a significant portion of Yemen’s air force and anti-aircraft defenses. Military bases and arms depots throughout the country have also come under attack.

The Houthi rebels have continued their assault on Aden, where Hadi had rallied loyal military forces before he fled the country for Saudi Arabia last week. Houthi forces that made an assault against Aden’s northeastern suburbs Monday were met with heavy rocket and artillery fire from Egyptian warships.

Saudi and Yemeni officials have asserted that military operations will continue until the Houthi militias are militarily defeated and Hadi is in a position to reassert control over the entire country. Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud promised that his country would continue its military operations “until stability is returned” to Yemen.

Speaking at the Arab League meeting in Sharm El Sheikh on Sunday, ousted Yemeni Foreign Minister Riyadh Yassin rejected the prospect of a negotiated settlement with the Houthis. “The operation will end when Yemen is safe and secure. But we will only negotiate with those who are willing to disarm,” he stated. “We won’t negotiate with [the Houthis] because they carried out a coup. They used the state’s weakness to take over.”

Saudi Arabia and Egypt, both close US allies, have backed the expanding campaign of air strikes with the threat of an imminent ground invasion to push back the Houthis. Saudi Arabia has mobilized as many as 150,000 soldiers and has positioned heavy artillery on its southern border with Yemen. Egypt has reportedly stationed troop ships off the coast of Yemen in preparation for an amphibious assault.

A delegation headed by Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaj Asif and foreign policy chief Sartaj Aziz will be in Saudi Arabia today, where they are expected to officially announce Pakistan’s decision to send troops to take part in the military assault in Yemen.

A senior Pakistani official told Reuters on Monday that his government was planning on dispatching a contingent of soldiers to Saudi Arabia to support military operations. “We have already pledged full support to Saudi Arabia in its operation against rebels and will join the coalition,” the official stated.

The open participation of Sunni majority Pakistan, which shares a border with Iran, in a ground invasion spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Egypt and backed by the United States would mark a significant escalation in the conflict. What began as a proxy war between the Shiite Houthis backed by majority Shiite Iran and the Yemeni government backed by the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia could rapidly devolve into an open sectarian conflict drawing in countries from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

The exact date when Anne and Margot died is not known. As stated in the statement of one of their fellow camp inmates: “One day they were just not there anymore”.

Researchers looked therefore at archives of the Red Cross and testimonies of survivors of Bergen-Belsen. The girls arrived in November 1944 at the camp.

Twelve days

The Anne Frank House in its research about the last months of Anne and Margot Frank concluded that it is unlikely that the girls were still alive in March. The sisters in early February 1945 had already, according to statements from inmates, symptoms of typhus. According to the National Institute for Public Health and Environment most people die about twelve days after the first symptoms.

WRITING in his Danish exile in the late 1930s, the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht famously posed the question: “In the dark times/Will there also be singing?” His answer was: “Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times” and the latest releases from radical publisher Smokestack Books are very much about our own dark era.

Clare Saponia’s The Oranges of Revolution (£7.95) examines the relationships between events such as the Arab spring and the riots in England in 2011, from cause to consequence, aspiration to betrayal, defeat to renewed hopes for social justice.

Martin Hayes has worked as a leaflet distributor, accounts clerk, courier, telephonist, recruitment manager and control room supervisor. His first full-length book When We Were Almost Like Men (£7.95) explores the world of work today, specifically the modern courier industry, and it’s a guide to a kind of hell that is fascinating, depressing, hopeless and hilarious. Here’s his take on the prospect of another week at work:

“we have tried to drink our way through it/we have tried smoking and injecting our way through it/we have tried running away from it/and we have tried running towards it… but nothing ever seems to do it as good/as the night when you’ve just finished your 60-hour week/controlling job/and go back to your flat with a bag of wine under your arm/only to crack open a few/sitting at your open window/staring dumb-eyed into the sun-setting-sky/trying not to let yourself dribble from the corners of your mouth/at the taste of such freedom/and the knowledge that you owe everybody in the world/absolutely/nothing.”

Sheree Mack was born in 1971 in Bradford to a Trinidadian father and a Geordie mother of Ghanaian and Bajan ancestry.

The book is a “shrine of remembrances” for the ordinary people behind the headlines and the hidden history of the revolution. These poems lament, rage and mourn. But they also celebrate the flames that burn in the hearts of a people still living in slavery’s dark shadow:

Jo Colley’s Bones of Birds (£7.95) is about flying and falling, about the earth and the sky. Zeppelins and birds, transported lovers, angels and witches fill the skies of Colley’s imagination and at the heart of the collection is a beautiful sequence about Soviet female fighter-pilots like Lydia Litvyak (1922-1943):

“I was so young: I didn’t know/what it was to be afraid. Lying/on my back in summer grass,/long before the war clouds gathered./the sky called me: my element,/more bird than girl./The nazis came, darkened the sun/like a flock of crows. I made myself eagle,/clenched my tender heart into a fist… Our days were short/but we made them long: each night/ended in song, our girls’ voices/offered to the stars.”

Steve Ely’s Englaland (£8.95) is a worthy follow-up to his Forward-nominated Oswald’s Book of Hours. It’s an extraordinary reimagining of the song composed by Egil Skallagrimsson for the English and their king after the battle of Brunanburh in AD 937. It’s a book about Yorkshire miners, pit-village bird-nesters, ageing prize-fighters, flying pickets and singing yellowhammers. And it’s an elegy for working-class England:

“In less than half a lifetime, almost everything’s/gone, the stranded poor picking bargain-bin/bric-a-brac on Oxfam, fast-food streets./Each man indoors before his screen, not knowing/his neighbour. The monied commute to work/and malls. Their suburbs could be anywhere./Politicians in thrall to globalised capital,/peddling cynical yes-we-can dreams… Who are we? And how do we want to live?”

Goran Simic, born in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1952, was a major literary figure in the former Yugoslavia and was caught in the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.

New and Selected Sorrows (£7.95) draws on some of Simic’s earlier collections, together with a long new sequence Wind in the Straight-jacket.

It is a book about passports and borders, rats and wolves, soldiers and ghosts. Narrated by “an ordinary man with ears of ordinary silk,” it is a record of the realities — and the unrealities — of life in the Balkans:

“I have seen the face of sorrow. It is the face of/the Sarajevo wind leafing through newspapers/glued to the street by a puddle of blood as I/pass with a loaf of bread under my arm./As I run across the bridge, full water canisters/in hand, it is the face of the river carrying the/corpse of a woman… the face with/which I wake to watch my neighbour standing/by the window, night after night, staring into/the dark.”

As a final decision on the renewal of Trident is expected to be taken in 2016, protesters also called on all parties to state their intentions on the matter.

Speaking from the Berkshire site, campaigner Emma Anthony told the Star: “The Parliament dissolves today and we want people to know that during the general election, during the run-up to it, Trident needs to be an issue.

“All parties need to give a statement on Trident in the same way that they are expected to talk about the NHS, immigration, Scotland.

“Trident needs to be an election issue — Trident renewal is illegal, so we are trying to prevent it from happening.”

Ms Anthony and six other campaigners travelled from across the country to disrupt production at the nuclear site for over three hours.

The demonstration at Burghfield — which finished with hymns being sung — followed an ecumenical vigil at the neighbouring AWE Aldermaston facilities the day before, which was Palm Sunday.

The loose network of Christian activists of all denominations said the timing of the protests was also important because, in Holy Week, “Jesus turned over tables in the temple, confronting the political and military powers of his day.”

Campaigner Jo Frew said: “Nuclear weapons are a threat to everything I believe in: peace, justice, and the wellbeing of creation.

“We see in Jesus’s actions a clear imperative that faith compels us to act.

“That is why we are here today to call for an end to the atomic weapons industry and for Trident not to be replaced.”

On Thursday, the German parliament voted by a large majority to extend its military operations in Somalia. Of the 578 votes cast, 454 delegates voted for the continuation of German involvement in the mission. There were 115 “no” votes and nine abstentions.

The decision provides for a continuation of earlier commitments to the European Union Training Mission in Somalia (EUTM SOM). Up to 20 soldiers are also to be used in the training of the Somali army and as advisers to the Somali defense ministry. The German military has been active in the Somali mission since 2010, in addition to its other deployments in the Horn of Africa, including Mission Nestor and Operation Atalanta.

As early as May of last year, the government adopted its “African policy guidelines,” which noted “Africa’s growing relevance for Germany and Europe.” Among other things, “Africa’s potential” derived from its growing, dynamic economy and “rich natural resources.” The German government therefore wanted to substantially strengthen “engagement with Africa’s politics, security policy and developmental policies,” to act “early, quickly, decisively and substantially” and “coordinate the use of … the entire spectrum of available means.”

That is the purpose of the German military intervention in Somalia. Dagmar Freitag, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, justified the extension as follows: “Somalia, as a so-called failed state, threatens the stability of the entire region in the Horn of Africa.” She added, this “remains a central problem in this region.”

The second spokesperson for the government coalition, CDU foreign policy strategist Roderich Kiesewetter, indicated that the mission in Somalia was only the prelude to a much larger intervention in Africa and worldwide. He cynically declared: “We Europeans are not there because we want direct military intervention, but because we want to help people to help themselves. … Above all, however, the roots of terrorism must be fought. It comes not only from Somalia, but also Boko Haram, Kenya and other countries like Nigeria and Libya. It also threatens, as we have just seen in Yemen, the security of Africa, the Arabic world and Europe.” …

Alexander Neu, who sits on the defense committee for the Left Party, criticized the “security policy concept of the West regarding the war on terrorism.” It would “only fight the symptoms,” he said. Above all, he complained of the close foreign policy collaboration with the US. “German state policy” would “rather participate in US war crimes—under cover, of course—than respect international law and human rights when it comes to German-American relations and German-American interests.” That is “the opposite of a responsible foreign and security policy.” …

Only a few weeks before the meeting with the Left Party, President Gauck visited Tanzania and Zanzibar. In Dar es Salam, the capital of the former German East Africa colony, he spoke of “peace and freedom,” “democracy and the rule of law,” and “human dignity and brotherhood.” At the same time, he praised Tanzania as “part of a common market of 145 million people” and applauded the economic and military collaboration of both countries.

Gauck was accompanied by a high-ranking trade delegation led by Christoph Kannengießer, the chair of the German-African Business Association. Just a few months prior, Kannengießer, reacting to the United States-Africa Leaders Summit held last August, demanded that German imperialism be more aggressive in pursuing its interests in Africa—including toward the US.

“For us, this means the Americans would be more relevant us as competitors,” he explained in an interview on Deutschlandfunk. He predicted: “Overall, the competition in these unsaturated markets on the African continent will be stronger and harder. In this respect, I believe that is an impetus for us as Germans and as Europeans to face our challenges and do what is necessary to safeguard our economic interests on the African continent.”